


here in the air I breathe

by stolemyslumber



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Ghosts, M/M, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stolemyslumber/pseuds/stolemyslumber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The weirdest part, out of everything, is that none of the houses look like they’re haunted.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	here in the air I breathe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [temporaryforce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporaryforce/gifts).



> For YAGKYAS 2014. Written for temporaryforce - I hope you like it!
> 
> Thanks to Lake for beta-reading!
> 
> Title from the song "Ground Beneath My Feet" by Sherwood.

*

The weirdest part, out of everything, is that none of the houses look like they’re haunted.

He'd heard enough of his great-aunt's stories growing up to know what to expect - the cold that sinks into his bones, the tightness in his chest, the sadness it takes him a few days to shake. Somehow he was least prepared for this - looking up at a picturesque little farmhouse and knowing what's waiting for them behind its light blue trim and matching curtains.

One of the curtains on the second floor twitches a little, even though the house has been empty since the new owners moved back out and called Nate for help a few days before.

“You ready?” Ray asks, ashing his cigarette and raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” John blurts out before he can really think about whether it’s true. “Yeah, sure.”

“Nah,” Ray says, “nobody’s really ready the first time they get shit thrown at their face. But don’t worry, we’ll protect you.”

“Stop scaring the kid, Ray.” Brad hooks an arm around Ray’s shoulders, ruffles his hair, and then steals his cigarette.

“I’m not scaring him! I’m preparing him,” Ray says. He turns to John, winking. “Aren’t I? Gotta know to protect that pretty face of yours once we get inside.”

Instead of answering, John says, “I’m not a kid,” because -- well, he’s not, he’s nineteen, and also because this is about the tenth time Ray’s blatantly flirted with him right in front of Brad, and he can’t tell if Brad’s cool with it or if it’s some sort of weird tactic Ray uses to make Brad jealous.

“Plenty grown up enough to have a ghost throw shit at your face,” Brad says agreeably. John makes a face, and Brad grins at him, holding the cigarette just out of Ray’s reach. “No, Ray -- as misguided and ill-informed about the optimal method of ghost hunting as he may be -- is right. Nothing’s gonna hit you. All the owners’ stuff is out, and --”

“And Brad will protect us with his magic,” Ray says, fluttering his eyelashes and swooning into Brad, who rolls his eyes and shoves Ray toward the equipment spread out on a fold-out table in the driveway. Ray waves a hand over his head as he ambles away. He’s got the cigarette back, somehow, and Brad’s staring after him with this fondly exasperated look that’s way above John’s tolerance for sweetness this early in the morning.

“C’mon,” Brad says after a moment. “I’ll show you the protections for us and all of Ray’s --” he raises his voice to carry over to Ray and his table of gadgets -- “unnecessary techno bullshit.”

The look of delight on Brad’s face at Ray’s response is better suited to getting flowers than to getting Ray’s middle finger waved in the air in his general direction. John’s pretty sure even a morning person would be grossed out by their cuteness by now.

*

An hour later, Nate’s back from town. The owners, terrified after the week they spent having their own possessions thrown at their heads and a disembodied voice screaming at them, refused to come out to the house even to give Nate the keys, so he had driven to their hotel in nearby Pigeon Forge to get them. On the way back, he stopped to pick up coffee, donuts, and batteries for some of Ray’s equipment.

He also brings some Australian milkweed, the final ingredient for both protection serums Brad’s showing John how to make. Once they’re done, Brad uses a paintbrush to put a careful dot of the greenish, plant-based serum on each of Ray’s pieces of equipment. The dot flashes and fades away to nothing each time.

The second serum, which is pink due to its raspberry base, Brad uses to trace a line around each of their wrists, like a bracelet. For that he uses his finger, a quick casual process with John and Nate that somehow becomes such an intimate process with Ray that it almost makes John blush. He applies the serum with the same quick, efficient strokes, but he’s not even looking at Ray’s wrist, just watching Ray’s face. Ray sucks in a breath at the first touch of serum -- whether it’s because of the cold liquid or because Brad is touching him, John isn’t sure -- and Brad _laughs_ at him, eyes still fixed on Ray’s face.

After he’s done with Ray, the two of them just stand there for a long moment, looking at each other, Brad holding Ray’s hand in his. Then he hands the bottle of serum to Ray, and Ray draws a line around Brad’s wrist, biting his lip in concentration. John busies himself with packing the serum supplies back up.

*

When they get inside, everyone goes very, very quiet. It’s just a feeling at first, and then they step through the threshold into the living room and -- John can’t quite hold back the startled noise that builds in his throat at the sight of the walls. Where the patterned wallpaper hasn’t been torn off in shreds, massive holes have been gouged in the walls.

Huge sections of the walls are blackened, like someone took a blowtorch to them or something. Through the doorway on the other side of the room, John can see the kitchen, where most of the cabinet doors and drawers have been smashed in or pulled off completely. The granite countertop is in pieces.

John shivers, goosebumps prickling across his skin. The mid-August heat somehow hasn’t breached the walls of the house. He takes a step forward, and the temperature drops again. Another, and it’s even colder.

"Jesus," Nate says under his breath. "Haven't seen anything like this since that serial killer house in Memphis. And even that..."

He trails off, looking like he doesn't want to finish his thought. Ray takes over for him. "That wasn't this crazy," he says. He's already got a tablet up and running, clicking through the output screens. "So there's probably gonna be - huh."

Brad steps closer to look over Ray's shoulder, looking at the screen, and Nate crosses the room to look, too. After a moment of hesitation, John follows; the science side of things has always been a confusing mess of technobabble to him, and he’s been too focused on learning as much as he can about magic from Brad that he hasn’t really had time to watch Ray work.

He looks over Nate’s shoulder anyway, and all he sees are a bunch of multicolored lines that don’t mean anything to him. Brad’s looking at it like it’s written in a foreign language, which makes John feel a little better about not knowing. Nate looks worried, which is an expression John hasn’t seen on him in the three months since John joined the team.

Ray clicks through a couple other screens, and each one looks kind of weird. When John’s caught glances of the tablet before - usually when Ray’s talking and waving it around to make a point - the lines have always been all over the screen, moving up and down. Right now, they’re flat across the bottom of the screen and completely still.

“Do you need to turn it on or something, tech whiz?” Brad asks. “Nothing’s moving.”

He goes to tap at the screen, and Ray pulls the tablet away. “No, I do not need to - Jesus Christ, it’s almost like you have no idea how any of this works,” he says, waving the tablet in the air. “It’s just - it’s not reading anything. So either there’s no ghost, and these people have a really stealthy vandal squatting in their basement who hates their shitty decorating taste, or something’s interfering with my equipment.”

Just then one of the stairs creaks, like they’re in an actual horror movie. John manages not to jump at the sound, which is sadly kind of a big accomplishment for him, and Ray grins at him.

“Here, hold this,” he says, depositing the tablet in John’s hands. John is totally not prepared to be in charge of anything in this house, let alone a piece of Ray’s precious diagnostic equipment. He can feel panic spreading across his face (and through his stomach), and Ray just laughs. “Just hold it, don’t freak out. I’m gonna try a couple other things. Just tell me if the pretty lines start moving, ‘kay?”

Then he’s gone, crossing through the kitchen while digging into his duffel bag o’ tech. John sees him twisting and jiggling the handle of a door in the hallway just past the kitchen, but it doesn’t budge. John thinks that’s where Nate said the basement is. Nate is drifting toward the stairs, eyes already starting to close, and Brad is looking intently at a page in one of his grimoires.

The whole house feels weird, like there’s not enough air, and the creaking sounds are increasing. John’s nervous, but at the same time, he’s more scared of dropping Ray’s crazy expensive tablet than anything the ghost could do to him. He knows it won’t get past Brad’s protection magic.

Across the room, Brad dips a paintbrush into one of his serum jars and starts to carefully paint sigils onto the wall. John takes a step toward him, wanting to watch, when there’s a series of thumps in the hallway Nate just went into. John jumps this time, fumbling with the tablet and almost dropping it.

“I’m okay,” Nate calls out. He taps on one of the walls, in a matching rhythm to the thumps. The house, for the moment, is silent.

John turns back toward Brad. He stops. The tablet’s lit up in his hands, lines moving all over the screen. It’s a different display than before, split into two boxes instead of one big one. John must have accidentally clicked something when he almost dropped it. There are lines moving across each box, but it’s not a rainbow. Just a set of blue lines in one box and red lines in the other. The blue lines twist together along the bottom of the screen, and the red along the top. The red lines sort of look like they’re building, almost pulsing.

“Ray?” he calls out, moving toward the kitchen. As he goes, he hears a series of thuds from the second floor of the house, almost like someone’s running straight across the length of the house, through the walls. Underneath the sound, something creaks.

“One sec,” Ray says. He’s standing on an unbroken patch of the counter, brows furrowed, holding a long antenna up toward the ceiling.

“Okay, but your -- your thing is… doing a thing,” John finishes, making a face at himself.

“What?” Ray asks, raising his voice a little to be heard over the rumbling sound that’s building under the thumping sounds.

“Your tablet,” John says, louder too. “The lines are moving.”

Ray’s head whips around, and John holds up the display for Ray to see.

“What the fuuuck,” Ray says, hopping down from the counter and coming over. He touches the screen a few times, bringing up data in little boxes. He calls Brad’s name - just his name, like it’s all he needs to say. There’s an edge of nervous energy in his voice.

John expects Brad to come running, but he just yells back, “Thirty seconds to pack up, two minutes to activate it,” which, what? John officially has no idea what’s going on, although the creeping sick feeling in the pit of his stomach isn’t giving him a good feeling about all of this.

“Something happened here,” Nate says from the doorway, sounding upset. As he comes closer, John can see that his eyes are still a little foggy. John’s mostly used to it now, but at first he’d started to panic when Nate had drifted past looking like he was a ghost himself, face pale and eyes clouded over. He’s not fully present with them when he gets like that - he can see what the ghosts are seeing sometimes, see the way the house looked when they lived in it and what happened to them. He feels what they feel, too - it’s amazing, the connection he builds with them, but sometimes John doesn’t know how he keeps doing it.

The rumbling noises have been getting louder, John realizes, and as Nate crosses the room, he could swear it sounds like someone talking. Or trying to, at least. Like something inhuman trying to speak with a human’s voice.

“Something is _still_ happening here,” Ray says, taking the tablet out of John’s hands and holding it up for Nate to see.

“What’s - wait, is that -” Nate goes even more pale, and then lists to the side, almost falling onto a sharp broken edge of counter before John reaches out and catches him. He leans into John, like he can’t hold himself up, and John pulls one of Nate’s arms over his shoulders, holding him up.

“What’s happening?” John asks, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. The broken pieces of granite still on the counter start to rattle. Ray’s putting the last piece of equipment safely back in his duffel bag, looking like he’s about to answer, when the air around them shifts. Ray’s eyes lock onto John’s, and then the wind _roars_ , swirling bits of broken granite into the air. The pieces swirl around them, smashing into the invisible barrier that Brad’s magic provides. And then the line around John’s wrist starts to tingle.

“Go!” Ray shouts over the roaring, pulling Nate’s other arm over his own shoulders. Nate’s eyes roll back in his head and they almost drop him when his knees buckle.

John ducks down, notching his right shoulder into Nate’s stomach and picking him up in a fireman’s carry. His wrist starts to burn as they move into the living room. He stumbles halfway to the door, and for a second it really feels like he’s going to fall and take Nate with him. Then he feels someone grab his left arm and steady him, keeping him on his feet. He looks over to thank Ray, but Ray’s behind him and the space to his left is empty.

Brad’s in the entryway, waiting for them. He’s got one hand on the doorknob and the other stretched out toward them, something silver on his fingertips. He touches each of them as they pass him, smearing his fingers over Nate’s hand, John’s arm, Ray’s cheek. John’s so focused on all of them getting out that he doesn’t realize his wrist has stopped burning until he’s laid Nate down on a cool, shady patch of grass by the RV. Nate’s conscious again, eyes wide, staring unseeing up at the sky.

*

“I don’t know what happened,” Nate says. He rubs his eyes.

Brad and Ray exchange worried looks. When they see John looking at them, Brad settles on the grass next to Nate and asks John to bring him some water.

Inside the RV, John lets himself panic, just for a minute. This is the best ghost hunting team in the country -- he honestly still can’t believe they chose him to replace Tony Espera when he decided to retire from active ghost hunting to teach and stay closer to his family. If they don’t know what’s going on, everyone is in trouble.

John brings Nate a bottle of water and a protein bar. A little more color has returned to his face, but he’s still leaning back against the RV’s front bumper, looking shell shocked.

“I don’t know what happened,” he says again. “It’s like the whole house just…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Something is _wrong_ in there.”

John isn’t going to argue with that. Even without Ray’s weird readings and Brad’s magic failing, he’s still got that feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s telling him something is wrong, too. He’s just not sure what.

Three hours later, he’s not sure any of them feel any better about being here. Nate stayed awake long enough to make a couple phone calls and send an email to a group of his old college friends who are on the research side of things before he crashed, still sitting on the couch with his tablet in his lap. Brad had carried him back to his bunk, and they’ve been taking turns checking on him every half hour or so.

John’s helping Brad with some research, but his mind keeps drifting back to the house. He can’t stop thinking about almost falling in the living room, the unmistakable feeling of hands curling around his arm. He can picture it in his mind, and he keeps mentally turning to his left, feeling like he almost remembers seeing someone next to him. There’s this urge coming from some crazy place in his mind, telling him to put down the juniper leaves he’s holding and walk up the lane and back into the house.

He shakes his head, like he can shake off the _move move move_ running up and down his spine.

“You okay?” Brad asks, taking two more leaves from John’s hand.

“I’m--” _fine_ , John should say, but his outstretched hand is shaking a little, and lying at this point seems a little silly. “I’m pretty freaked out,” he admits. “I mean, Nate passed out. And your magic --”

Brad clenches his jaw. “That won’t happen again,” he promises. “I’m making something that this thing will never get past.”

“I know, yeah, of course. It’s more… what Nate said about something happening in there. I know I haven’t been doing this for very long, but I feel like I know what he means. Like… like I almost don’t wanna know what happened, y’know?”

“'Something happening'? I think he said that something’s _wrong_ in there.”

“No, he said…” John trails off, thinking of how Nate had looked in the kitchen. Had his eyes looked weird? Had he been connected to whoever had kept John from falling?

“John?”

“Yeah?” John blinks, realizing he’s staring at the house again. “Oh! Sorry. Sorry, um, he said ‘Something’s wrong’ after we got out here, but when he came into the kitchen earlier, he said ‘Something _happened_ here.’”

“Huh.” Brad takes the last of the juniper out of John’s hand. “Can you wash your hands and start crushing a couple ounces of indium? We’ll talk to Nate about it when he wakes up, figure out what he meant.”

When Nate wakes up a few hours later, though, he’s still so drained that all he can do is eat the sandwich Ray sets in front of him and fall back asleep.

The rest of them spend the next few hours working in the RV’s little seating area. John sits at the fold-down dining table, his tablet open in front of him. He’s working his way through all his favorite message boards, trying different strings of search terms and posting in the “Advice Needed” section, hoping someone will have dealt with something similar to what’s happening here.

Brad and Ray are on the couch, pressed together from knee to shoulder. Ray’s inputting all his results onto his custom-built laptop - he’s got his own analytic software, and he’s also uploading everything onto a server the group shares with a bunch of other hunters and researchers. Brad’s flipping through a stack of books while he waits for the new protection serum he’s making to be ready for the next ingredient.

When the sun goes down, the itch between John’s shoulder blades gets even stronger. He shuts down his tablet - he hasn’t found anything even close to ghosts being able to fuck with scientific readouts or burn off protection serum - and turns toward the couch, clearing his throat.

“Did you find anything?” he asks, voice barely more than a whisper. “There’s nothing on any of the boards.”

Ray shifts on the couch, pulling his legs up and tucking his bare toes under Brad’s thigh. “I uploaded everything. No matches. To anything. The closest I can find is a triple demon possession in Sacramento, but this--”

“--is not a demon,” Brad finishes. “A demon couldn’t destroy a protection like this.”

He’s clenching his fingers so tightly on the 200-year-old book in his hands that his knuckles are turning white. John thinks he understands - he’s never done the kind of magic Brad can do, not yet, but even when he practices, everything he makes feels like it’s part of him. And Brad’s magic is more than just practice - he uses it to protect all of them. Having some invisible asshole ghost fuck with that can’t be easy.

“Hey,” Ray says, tugging the book out of Brad’s hands and pulling him to his feet. “I’ve officially been staring at a screen too long, I’m gonna head to bed.”

Brad nods, stifling a yawn. He moves to start putting all his books and notepads away.

“Hey, I can do that,” John offers.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m ready to go to sleep yet.”

“Thanks.” Brad squeezes his shoulder as he goes past. “G’night.”

*

He isn’t sure what woke him. He thinks, at first, that it must have been a noise -- they’re far enough out in the country that there are sounds at night, familiar from when John lived in the boonies as a kid, but different enough from the city sounds he’s used to now that they might wake him up. He realizes, as he sits up and slips his shoes on, that it wasn’t a noise. It was the house.

He’s careful to be quiet as he climbs out of his bunk and out of the RV. Outside, the sky is clear and the moon is almost full; the yard is bright enough for John to make his way up to the house and go inside.

It’s really quiet. Weirdly so, it occurs to him, but he dismisses the thought -- it’s not important right now. He shivers, breaths coming out in puffs.

“Are you here?” he calls out quietly.

“I wasn’t sure you were gonna come.”

When John turns, there’s a man coming down the stairs. He falters when his eyes meet John’s, grabbing the railing to catch his balance. He keeps his gaze locked on John’s, and John finds he can’t look away, either. He’s younger than John expected; he barely looks older than John himself. He’s wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, and John has an overwhelming urge to touch him.

“Hi,” he blurts out when the man is standing in front of him.

“Hi,” the man says, lips curling up into a smirk. “I’m Evan.”

“John.”

He reaches out a hand automatically, and Evan does, too. His palm presses against Evan’s, and the restless feeling that’s been crawling through him for hours goes suddenly, blissfully quiet. Evan’s skin is warm. John runs his thumb over Evan’s knuckles, relishing the warmth.

“Oh, shit,” Evan says, eyes wide. “I can touch you.”

“Yeah,” John says, a little breathy. Evan’s smirk blooms into a grin and then fades just as fast.

“I kept trying to tell them,” he says. “But I can barely move most of the time, and when he gets like that, something in me is just, like, frozen or something.”

“He,” John echoes. “There are two of you.”

“Shit, yeah, I’m not the one trying to burn the place down or whatever this asshole thinks he’s doing to his own house. But I can’t--”

“John?” Nate is standing in the open doorway, silhouetted by the moon. John watches his gaze travel down John’s outstretched arm to his hand, still holding Evan’s, and then onto Evan’s face, like Nate hadn’t even noticed him before now. “What are you doing?”

John wakes up, sitting up so fast he almost hits his head on the ceiling of his bunk. Nate is sitting on the edge of the mattress, fog clearing from his eyes.

“What the fuck just happened?” Brad asks, leaning around Nate to grab John’s arm and smear something sour-smelling across his wrist. There’s a little flash, and then his whole bunk smells sour and wrong.

“What is that?” John asks, pulling his wrist out of Brad’s hand. “What are you doing? Are you getting rid of him?”

It’s not until his voice cracks on the last word that he realizes he’s shouting, and he puts a hand over his mouth, shrinking backward. He’s _freezing_ , he realizes, feeling the absence of Evan’s warm hand in his like an icy knot in his stomach that radiates outward. Ray appears behind Brad, handing him a blanket. Nate takes it, wrapping it around John. It helps a little, but John’s still shaking.

“Sometimes, when this happens to me,” Nate says, “I wake up and I’m not sure if it was a dream or real. Most of the time, I can feel that it was real, but this serum proves it, just in case.”

“So I -- I was really in the house? I really talked to him?”

“You _talked_ to it?” Ray says, pushing in between Nate and Brad. “Are you okay? Did it hurt you?”

“His name is Evan,” John says. He pulls the blanket tighter around himself, feeling like he might throw up. Evan had seemed so trapped and alone, and John had just left him there. “He said there were two of them in there. Him, and whoever’s destroying the house.”

They’re all quiet, and then Nate puts a gentle, careful hand on John’s arm. “John,” he says, “I’m sorry, but we can’t trust that that’s true. I’ve had this happen before, where I believed someone I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” John says, shaking his head. He doesn’t know how, but he knows Evan wasn’t lying to him. “No, there’s no way.”

He doesn’t know how to explain it, though. Not in a way that will convince them. They’re all looking at him with these soft, sad looks, and John wants to scream. Or cry. Or go back to sleep and go talk to Evan again, get proof.

“Look,” he says to Nate. “You saw him, right? He wasn’t hurting me. He was going to tell me what was going on. Can’t I just -- or you can come, we can both go back to sleep and go back inside and just _talk_ to him--”

Nate climbs into his bunk, and it’s not until John’s in his arms, face tucked into Nate’s shoulder, that John realizes he’s crying.

“I know,” Nate whispers. “It fucking sucks, doesn’t it? Meeting someone and knowing they’re already gone?” Ray makes a startled noise, but Nate keeps going. “And maybe you’re right. I’m not saying we’re not going to find out. Something happened in this house, and we’re not doing anything official until we figure out what. But we’re not doing it tonight.”

John shakes his head. “ _Please_ \--”

Nate pulls back, lifting John’s chin until John looks at him. “What you just did takes a lot of strength. Right now you’re high on adrenaline and holding hands with a cute boy, but in a few minutes you’re gonna feel like you got run over by a train. And after whatever happened to me this afternoon, I’m not really up for another round, either.”

He pulls the blanket up where it’s slipped off John’s shoulders. “Also, I’m just gonna be honest, I have no idea how you dream-walked without even intending to.”

“Um,” John says, remembering how he’d only been able to fall asleep by telling himself he’d get to go back inside the house in the morning. “I think Evan helped me when we were trying to get out of the house yesterday? And then I kept thinking about how I needed to go back inside?”

“Oh my god,” Ray says. “The next time something weird happens when we’re in a _haunted house_ , you tell us, okay?”

“Yeah, we’re definitely talking about this,” Brad says, wrapping an arm around Ray’s shoulders. “In the morning.”

He pulls Ray to his feet and goes to the sitting area, dropping Ray off at his bunk on the way. When he comes back, he’s got a small vial.

“Drink this,” he says. “It’ll keep you from dream-walking.”

“Just for tonight, right? Tomorrow night we can go back?” John looks between Brad and Nate.

“Tomorrow,” Nate assures him, then swings up into his own bunk, above John’s. “Goodnight, guys.”

“Night,” they all chorus.

Reluctantly, John cracks the seal on the vial and downs it. It tastes kind of like maple syrup. Brad takes the vial out of his hand and replaces it with a protein bar, already open. John eats it in about three bites, barely chewing, and then the whole world kind of tilts.

“There it is,” Brad says, plucking the wrapper out of John’s fingers. “Goodnight, John.”

*

In the morning, John gets woken up by the smell of bacon. Ray’s at the tiny stove in the kitchenette, wearing a bright pink apron. He serves himself and John each a stack of pancakes and a pile of crunchy bacon. For a while they eat in companionable silence, and then when they’re both almost done, Ray turns to John, eyes serious.

“So your ghost boy is cute, huh?” he asks.

John swallows his mouthful of bacon and buries his face in his hands, groaning.

“No? Not cute?”

John lifts his head up and glares at Ray.

“Hey, don’t glare at the man who made you bacon,” Ray says, even as he steals a piece off John’s plate. “Look, it’s gonna suck, okay? I think it’s happened to all of us at some point -- either a crush, or..." He looks at John, rueful and a little sad. "It’s not like they’re all gonna be assholes destroying houses. A lot of them are just confused, or they’re trying to make sure their family’s gonna be okay. It’s totally normal to be sad or pissed off about what happened to them, and part of you is gonna want to fix it. But you can't. You gotta figure out how to keep from getting too attached, or you'll go nuts.”

John bites his lip. He can’t tell Ray it already feels like it’s too late. He spent less than ten minutes with Evan; the way he’s feeling right now is crazy.

“We can’t let him stay,” Ray says. “Even if something shitty happened to him. He doesn’t belong here anymore.”

“I know,” John snaps, feeling bad almost instantly. “Shit, sorry. I know that. I know he’s -- he’s dead.”

Ray pulls him into a hug. “You know you can talk to us, right? I know we’re your _idols_ and everything--”

“Ughhh,” John groans. He never should have told them that he’s been following all their social media accounts for years. It’s clearly gone to their heads.

“--but you can tell us anything. Including your ghost crushes.”

“Okay,” John says, taking a deep breath. He looks Ray in the eyes. “You have pancake batter on your stupid face.”

Ray breaks into crows of delighted laughter, smacking a kiss right on John’s lips and disappearing into the bathroom. Brad walks in from outside, carrying a couple shopping bags. He’s looking at John with this odd expression on his face, and John has a moment of panic that he saw the kiss and thinks something’s going on between John and Ray.

“You know,” Brad says, unpacking several bottles of ingredients, “if Ray’s ever making you uncomfortable, I can get him to stop.”

“Oh,” John says, confused and relieved. “No, he’s -- I mean, I know he doesn’t mean it like that. But… doesn’t it make _you_ uncomfortable? Or mad or anything?”

“Why would it make me mad?” Brad asks, bemused.

“Because the two of you are dating,” John says, thinking it should be kind of obvious. And then Brad drops the box of ganji root he’d been inspecting and stares at John. “Wait, are you not dating? But you -- you’re both so -- you were basically snuggling on the couch yesterday!”

Brad looks like he’s about to argue, then like he’s remembering their research session yesterday. His eyes go a little wide. “But we don’t sleep in the same bunk,” he points out, and then John can literally see him imagining sharing a bunk with Ray. His cheeks go a little pink, even.

“Who doesn’t sleep in the same bunk?” Ray asks. He’s freshly showered, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist.

“Us,” Brad says, voice going low.

Ray pokes at a few of the bottles on the table, completely oblivious to the way Brad’s looking at him. “You and John?”

“No,” Brad says. Ray finally looks up; when he meets Brad’s eyes, he goes very, very still. “You and I.”

“Oh,” Ray says faintly, drifting closer to Brad.

“I’m going to go outside,” John announces, grabbing his tablet and fleeing.

*

Nate comes back half an hour later from a meeting with an old colleague who lives in Gatlinburg. He’s got a hopeful look on his face, and he tells John his friend gave him some good ideas.

John has to tell him they should maybe avoid the RV for a while, and Nate actually hugs him, explaining that he’s spent almost two years waiting for Brad and Ray to get their shit together.

While they wait, Nate turns his notes from the meeting into an action plan, and John checks his posts on all the message boards. There are a few replies, but nothing promising. He posts an update about his dream walk the night before on each board and starts looking through an online database of rare spells and serums.

Eventually, it’s safe to go back inside. Brad and Ray are flushed and happy, grinning at each other randomly. Every time they do and John or Nate notices, they end up grinning, too, so they’re all just smiling at each other the whole time Nate’s going over the plan for the day.

So, of course, everything goes to hell about five minutes after they get back in the house.

They’re far more prepared this time -- Brad used his new protection serum on all of them, and he brought a few other jars and vials inside with him. He also made Nate something to keep him present while they’re in the house, to prevent a repeat of whatever happened to him yesterday. And Ray has almost every piece of equipment he owns up and running, recording every possible type of data.

In all honesty, John feels a little useless. His job today is to assist everyone else, and “holler if he feels weird again,” according to Ray. He’s holding one of Ray’s antennas over his head in one hand and has just handed Brad a handful of crushed attalea -- to re-do the sigils Brad painted on the wall yesterday, which were burned off during the night -- when he feels a light touch on his wrist.

“Um. I think Evan’s here,” he says. Evan’s fingers trace the lines of his palm and then he laces their fingers together. John squeezes and Evan squeezes back.

They stand like that for a while, while everyone else wanders around the house. He hears Ray try the door to the basement again -- it’s still wedged shut. A moment later, Evan’s hand goes tight around his, and then he’s being pulled toward the exit. Behind him, the wind suddenly surges to life.

“Guys!” he shouts. He stops himself in the doorway, shoving the antenna and the little box it’s attached to into his pocket. He reaches out for Evan, trying to touch his arm or his shoulder, but his hands are the only things that are solid.

“Brad used something else this time, it’ll protect us,” he promises.

It doesn't, though. It holds longer than the last one did, but eventually the protection serum still starts burning on John's wrist. As the others stumble toward the door, John sees Brad’s face twist in pain, and he almost falls. Ray pulls him up, and the two of them and Nate reach the door at the same time. John pushes them through, and then he feels hands pushing him through after them. The door slams shut.

*

In the RV, Ray and Nate lay Brad down on the couch. He's shaking with pain and anger, demanding to be let up so he can start on a new, stronger serum. Ray refuses, holding Brad down by his shoulders.

Eventually, Ray stretches out next to Brad on the couch, and Nate and John end up on the floor in front of them. Nate’s going through every single one of his hunting contacts, looking for someone who's been through anything close to what they're experiencing.

John checks his posts -- nothing.

They sit there for an hour or so, Nate sending out texts and Ray finally giving in and writing down all the ingredient combinations Brad’s coming up with while he waits for his new readings to upload to the server. After a while, Brad falls asleep, and then Ray. John feels like he’s about to follow them when Nate’s phone rings, making all the of them jump.

It's someone Nate emailed yesterday, and she thinks she might know what they're dealing with. She only lives forty-five minutes away, so she's driving down with all her notes and supplies.

Brad falls back asleep almost immediately after that, but the rest of them are too keyed up at the prospect of a solution to relax. John plays with his tablet for a while, then gives up, leaning back against the couch.

“Did we ever tell you about the time this family called us in to get rid of a ghost and it turned out to be a badger that was living in their attic?” Ray asks quietly, head resting on Brad’s chest.

Half an hour later, John’s heard Ray’s top five ghost (and/or badger) stories, and a car’s pulling up outside. John follows Nate outside, where a dark-haired woman is climbing out of a beat-up SUV. Nate crosses to her and envelops her in a hug. They both linger in it, not pulling away until John is starting to feel like he should go inside and let them be alone for a little while.

“Jo,” Nate says, pulling back and smiling at her. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Likewise,” she says, squeezing his arms. “Well, not like this, but.”

They both smile at each other, and then turn to John in unison.

“Hi, I’m Jo,” she says, reaching out a hand. John steps forward and shakes it.

“John,” he says, returning her smile. She looks a little teary-eyed, now that John’s closer to her, and he wonders how she and Nate know each other. Maybe if they all get through this, he can convince Nate to tell him about her.

“Alright,” Jo says, hoisting her messenger bag up onto her shoulder. “Let’s get started.”

*

Six years ago, Jo tells them, she was researching some of the most legendary ghost hunters, and she interviewed Carol Hu, one of the most prolific hunters of all time. The email Nate sent had reminded her of a story Hu told her, one that didn’t make it into Jo's published research.

“It was this house that no one could even get into,” Jo says, opening up a weathered green notebook. “The forces inside were so strong that it was like the front door was welded shut. Carol had to bring in reinforcements - two triads of magic users who formed a bond together and became strong enough to get inside. When they finally got in, the house was destroyed -- the way she describes it is really close to the way you described the house here.

“Every time they went inside, all their protection charms and serums would be destroyed, but eventually they ran enough tests that they figured out what happened. Some sort of coven had lived there, and they’d all been doing a spell together when something went wrong and they basically obliterated themselves. But they’d sunk so much magic into the house, protecting it and camouflaging it, that when they died, their ghosts became part of the house itself, feeding on the power they’d left in it.”

“That is insane,” Ray says. “That house looks like something Laura Ingalls Wilder dreamed up, you'd think it would've been hard for a coven to truly be dedicated to worshipping the devil in something that cute. What’d it take to get rid of them? Do we need a triad?”

“Not necessarily,” Jo says. She flips a page in her notebook and hands it to Ray, who takes one look at it and hands it to Brad. “A lot of the protections had been built into the house using sigils on the walls or the foundation. Destroying those sapped a lot of the coven’s power. After the sigils were broken, Carol was able to get rid of the members of the coven one by one, using that chant.”

Brad sits up, leaning heavily into Ray’s side. “This is word for word?”

Jo laughs. “Yeah, Carol triple-checked it and corrected my typos. The serum she used to break the protections is on the page before that, but that’s fairly standard -- the only addition is the cerium dust. The chant isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before, though. Carol came up with it herself, and I’ve never heard of anyone using it ever since.”

“‘Go to where you belong,’” Brad says, touching the page almost reverently. “I like it. I think this could work.”

Nate makes a noise of agreement. “If there are protection sigils on the house, then this sounds like it’s what’s happening here. This could be exactly what we need.”

“‘Where you belong,’” John repeats. “What about Evan? This will make him --” He stops himself. He can’t think about it that way. “This will help him move on?”

Nate reaches out, squeezing John’s shoulder. “It will. It won’t be the same for him -- he might not even be holding on, whatever else is in there might be keeping him there. But you can tell him tonight, if you want.”

“We’re still going?” John says, just as Jo says, “Wait, sorry, who’s Evan?”

Nate tells her what happened the night before, and Jo looks at John with sympathetic eyes. “You should definitely tell him tonight,” she says. “If he understands what’s happening, it should help him move on.”

The _and you can say goodbye_ is unspoken, but John knows that’s what everyone’s thinking. He nods anyway; just because it pisses him off doesn’t mean that any of them are wrong.

Brad is almost out of one of the ingredients for the serum to destroy the sigils, so he and Ray borrow Jo’s car and head off to Pigeon Forge. Nate and Jo both look like they’re bracing themselves for an awkward conversation, so when Nate suggests that John take a nap -- he won’t get much real sleep that night, Nate says, since his consciousness will be leaving his body to go into the house -- he jumps on the idea. Nate makes him drink a half-dose of the serum Brad gave him the night before, but John doesn’t mind. He’ll be back in the house tonight.

*

Brad and Ray bring back barbecue for dinner, and they sit outside in the fading sunlight to eat. Brad makes fun of Ray mercilessly for how he can’t keep his face clean for more than two bites, but he keeps gently wiping Ray’s mouth with a napkin and then kissing him. Nate and Jo are sitting together, sharing a plate and smiling at each other hesitantly. John hates them all a little bit, right now, and feels guilty for it.

There’s no itch between John’s shoulder blades tonight. He feels shivery with anticipation, but he doesn’t have any urge to get up and run into the house. It’s only another hour before the day they’ve had catches up with everyone and they’re ready to go to sleep. He and Nate leave their bunk curtains open, so the others can take shifts watching over them and wake them up if it seems like anything’s going wrong. John lies down, thinking of going back into the house, being able to see Evan again. He closes his eyes, and he’s asleep within minutes.

When he opens his eyes, Nate is already standing in the aisle outside his bunk. “Ready?” he asks, and John nods.

They walk across the lawn and up to the front door. Inside, Evan is already waiting in the living room, bouncing up and down on his toes. His feet are bare, John notices, eyes traveling up to Evan’s face.

“Hey,” Evan says. “You okay?”

“I’m good,” John says. He reaches out to take Evan’s hand, and then lifts his other hand to touch Evan’s arm, the way he’d tried to yesterday. He slides his hand up to Evan’s shoulder, and then steps in closer, wrapping his arms around Evan. “Are you?”

Evan nods and sighs, leaning into John like all the tension’s suddenly gone out of him. He shifts a little, hands running up and down John’s back. “You brought a friend,” he murmurs.

“Yeah, that’s --” John turns a little, so they can both look at Nate, who’s still in the doorway. “That’s Nate. Nate, this is Evan.”

“Hey,” Evan says. He looks nervous, now, shifting like he’s going to offer Nate his hand to shake.

“That’s alright, you don't have to,” Nate says, coming a little closer. “I would like to ask you a few questions, though, if that’s okay.”

They end up sitting on the floor, John holding Evan’s hand in his lap and Nate sitting across from them.

“Do you know why we’re here?” Nate asks, gentle but blunt.

Evan shrugs. “To get rid of the crazy asshole who keeps destroying the house,” he says.

“Mm-hmm.” Nate waits. Evan stares at him for a long moment before looking away, down at his and John’s hands.

“And me. To get rid of me.”

“Him, we want to get rid of. But you’re not here to hurt anyone. And I don’t think this was ever your house, was it?”

Evan cocks his head to one side. “Nah, pretty sure it wasn’t.”

“So why are you still here?”

John tenses, because Nate usually takes a lot longer to get to that question. Evan squeezes his hand. “Look, I tried to leave, right? ‘Cuz I got sick of Mr. Big Bad Sorcerer throwing shit around. But I’m stuck here.”

“If you want to leave, we can help you do that,” Nate says. “We can help you move on. Whether it’s him that’s keeping you here or something else.”

Evan wraps his other hand over their joined hands. “Thing is,” he says, “I don’t really remember why I’m here. It feels like I haven’t been here very long, but I’m not really sure.”

Nate frowns, glancing around the living room before he focuses back on Evan. “I’m sorry you don’t remember. It might be something he did. If there’s power lingering in the house, keeping you here, it should go away when we break the sigils tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Evan looks up at John, eyes pleading. “You have to do it then?”

John looks at Nate. Maybe they could wait a day or two. But Nate’s shaking his head.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But everything we’re seeing -- Ray’s readings, the way Brad’s magic has been affected -- says that whoever else is in this house, they’re getting stronger. We can’t wait any longer.”

John feels a shudder go through Evan, and he hunches in on himself a little.

“John,” Nate says quietly. “I’m going to go back to the RV. Take as much time as you need, okay?”

John nods, already wrapping his arms around Evan. They sink down to the ground, and John curls around Evan. They stay there for a long time.

*

Beneath an overgrown tangle of vines on the east side of the house, there’s a defense sigil painted in what has to be blood.

“Well,” Ray says. “That explains a lot.”

There’s a rumbling coming from inside the house. It must be just from them finding the sigil. It builds with every one they find, and turns into a roar as Brad draws over each one with Carol Hu’s serum. When he activates it and all the sigils flash and burn away, the sounds coming from inside the house turn into a high shrieking scream, so loud that John covers his ears. Then Nate’s turning him and pushing him toward the house.

Inside, each of them takes a copy of the chant, and they spread out around the house. Nate, Brad, and Jo are all upstairs, where the sounds seem to be coming from. Ray and John are on the first floor, Ray in the living room and John in the back hallway. They have to fight their way there through the rushing wind.

The screaming hasn’t stopped. The wind is howling louder, too, and John resists the urge to cover his ears. He can barely hear the others, but he joins in on the second line, shouting into the wind.

At first, it doesn’t seem like anything is happening. Chunks of granite are flying out of the kitchen and hitting the wall in front of John, and none of their chanting is doing anything. Then John feels something warm -- Evan is next to him. He wraps his arms around John’s waist. John can feel all of him now, pressed up against John’s side, and knowing that they both get to have this before Evan has to leave makes it a little easier.

They finish the next round of the chant, and something _changes_. The wind cuts out, just for a moment, and John feels a surge of triumph. It picks back up again, a little quieter, and John knows it’s working.

 _Go to where you belong_ , he thinks, shouting the Latin words up at the ceiling. Evan’s arms tighten around him, and John feels him press his face into John’s neck.

It takes two more repetitions. The house is suddenly completely silent, so quiet John can hear birds chirping in the cluster of trees a hundred yards away from the house. Evan is shaking.

“I’m sorry,” John whispers, touching Evan’s face, his hair. “Sorry, sorry, it’s okay, it’s alright--”

He repeats the chant. _Go to where you belong_ , one more time, so quiet he can barely hear himself. The feeling of Evan wrapped around him slowly fades away.

*

John leans against the wall, sinking down to the floor. It’s over.

Ray burst through the doorway and drops down next to him. “John?” he asks. “John, look at me.”

“It’s okay,” John says. The others come down the stairs and into the hallway. “I’m okay.”

Brad kneels next to him, looking exhausted and sad. Nate sits at John’s feet, and Jo slides down the wall to sit across from them.

“It’s alright,” John says again, and then there’s a thump from behind the door to the basement.

They all freeze. Another sound, this one a little closer. Then another.

Ray scrambles to his feet, pulling John with him. They cluster in the doorway to the kitchen, squeezing closer together every time the noises get closer.

“Get ready to run if we need to,” Jo says quietly.

The sounds stop at the top of the stairs. The lock clicks, the door swings open, and Evan is standing at the top of the stairs. John can’t believe how different he looks from the man he met two nights ago. He’s pale and shaking, barely keeping himself on his feet, and he’s got tears running down his face.

“Oh my god,” Nate says.

“ _Oh my god_ ,” John says. He runs across the hallway and skids to a stop in front of Evan, staring at him in shock. “You’re real.”

His hands raise up without him really thinking about it, and he cups Evan’s face in his hands. “You’re real,” he says again. Evan’s answering grin is huge, and he grabs John by his shirt, pulling him into his arms.

 

*

Epilogue 

When people ask how John and Evan met, no one ever believes them. “A crazy sorcerer tried to steal Evan’s magic, the spell misfired, the sorcerer died and became a ghost, and Evan’s consciousness was separated from his body until John and the team came along and saved him” sounds like a story they made up so no one would know they met on an online dating site or something.

People always look at them like they’re waiting for the punch line, and John knows it’s more than a little crazy. They still don’t know how Evan survived like that for so long. The night they finally released Evan from the hospital, when he curled up with John in his bunk, Evan had whispered that he thought maybe he’d really died, and that the spell had brought him back. “‘Go to where you belong’, right?” he’d said. “Well, I belong with you.”

And he does, is the thing. John just stares at him sometimes, until Evan laughs and kisses him to distract him, because he can’t believe how lucky he is. He came to a little farm house in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, to get rid of a ghost, and he got Evan instead. Well, after a little bit of absolute terror, of course.

They’ve spent the past year driving across the country in an RV, a year that's been better than John could have ever hoped for. They're on their way to Boise, and John’s ready for whatever happens next.

*

*

*


End file.
